One Per Cent

Wish you were here? Bryan Russell at the University of Washington in Seattle and colleagues have developed the first online system that automatically creates annotated 3D reconstructions of tourist sites. To build up the visualisation, off-the-shelf software grabs images from online photo sites such as Flickr and stitches them together in three dimensions. The system uses Wikipedia entries for the site to annotate the visual model. Users can zoom in on a feature, or, where a narrative sequentially describes a site, they can embark on a fly-through to visualise the description.

"I just used my phone for about 20 minutes and now I feel like I'm going to vomit"One of many complaints on an Apple forum that animations in the iOS 7 operating system are making users nauseous

Bringing a PC to the console battle

Watch out Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Wii U – Steam Box is gearing up for a fight. US video game firm Valve fired off a salvo of announcements last week outlining its plans to bring PC gaming to gamers' living rooms. The company said that next year it would release a compact PC, the Steam Box, as well as a Linux-based operating system, SteamOS, and a videogame controller with super-precise touchpads that mimic the feel of a mouse and keyboard.

Careful what you say

Our words are a dead giveaway. The language we use speaks volumes about our personality, says Saif Mohammad at the National Research Council Canada. He has built software that analyses the sentiment of the language in a series of essays, and gauges each author's personality. When evaluating anonymous essays, most of the time it agreed with psychologists' assessments of where the author fell among the "Big Five" personality traits of extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness.

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